Musings on computers and software as I continue learning and sharing software development knowledge.

Monday, June 29, 2009

JavaFx- Skeptical Student's point of view

Why JavaFx right now? This is a question that has led me to be skeptical about this technology. As of now, the 1.2 version is out which requires at least a java 6 update 13 JDK, which essentially means that this technology is growing at an immense rate. However, the market out there of RIAs is quite ripe and in the next few years is going to be the ‘in’ thing. Keeping that in picture, a lot of companies have brought out their platforms (like silverlight, flex, etc). Only time will tell us the fate of these technologies as it is their adoption by various mobile/hardware vendors, which will decide what would be the preferable one amongst them, when it comes to their marketability.Sun Microsoft is currently developing and promoting their JavaFx and this reminds me of JSF, which was launched in a similar fashion. Based on my observations, I’ve drawn quite a lot of parallels amongst them. Both have excellent integration with the Netbeans IDE as well as compatible with other products as well. Excellent documentation and tutorials are available for these (thanks to efforts by sun and everybody else). The development style of both is quite revolutionary and, I’d say, surprisingly pleasing if you’ve had the right tools.However, JSF didn’t quite achieved what it was meant to do- a replacement of struts. The ui model is complicated for many and for me, jsf does still have those dark corners which make me hesitant to use them. Here, I am not going against JSF, but I’d like to make a point that currently, frameworks like spring have brought in innovative technology and are currently, the most sought-after when it comes to job requirements. However, as frameworks mature, like JSF, there comes a bit of stability as well as integration like what Jboss Seam did to JSF, increasing flexibility and keeping it simple(or even more easy).So, what lies in store for a student?Keeping in view the current market status, investing one’s time in JavaFx looks like a risky proposition to me as arguably, one can learn technologies like LAMP (configuration and app. development) to be marketable instead of this JavaFx scripting language (just comparing job prospects, and not the technologies here).On the sidenote, JavaFx is one of the most promising and exciting technology but the pace of its development certainly is a source of concern as not everyone has an adequate bandwidth to cope up with the frequent updates. For a student, it’ll require a lot of efforts (or time) to keep abreast with the latest changes in JavaFx, a thing which we do not have the luxury of as a vast majority needs to build their skills in basic programming and then, enterprise development.As a personal note, although JavaFx looks quite promising to me (I’ve been hearing about this for an year now), there are enough reasons for me to postpone the learning of this technology as currently, I’d just wait and watch.